Incredibly Slow Refresh Rates Make This LCD Easy On the Eyes

One of the reasons the Kindle's e-ink display is more enjoyable to read with is because it's not constantly refreshing. You might not be able to discern it, but the high-speed flicker of your LCD can lead to eye strain and headaches. So a research lab in Japan has developed a display that can refresh as slowly as once every five seconds.

The 6.05-inch LCD panel of course doesn't always refresh that slowly. When playing video or games it can presumably maintain the requisite 60 frames per second refresh rate so images don't appear choppy. But when displaying static images it can slow things down so that over the course of a work day there's less strain on a user's eyes.

The display also uses red, green, and blue LEDs for its backlight, with the blue LED tweaked so that it doesn't emit light with a wavelength less than 420nm (which has been found to be harmful to the eye). As for availability, the display was recently shown off at a trade show in Japan, and will hopefully be making its way into low-end tablet devices in the coming year. [Tech-On!]